Author Archive

A reinvention of Maher’s 1992 xerox book Redbook: A Book of Hours, Redbook Redux assembles visual elements appropriated from illuminated manuscripts spanning several centuries in both Europe and the Middle East. But on this luscious ground we find FBI statistics on “forcible rape” used to divide the days of the month into intervals of six minutes. Logged against a listing of women’s (and men’s) names, this book becomes a horrific testimony of the extent to which our culture tolerates personal violence.

Designed with scrolled, calligraphic script, Miranda Maher’s poster How To Forget What You Gave Away satirically mimics the United States’ Declaration of Independence. With witty, subversive statements like “Don’t wonder what happened to our independent, truth seeking media. (Troublemakers!)” and “Enjoy the increasing power of the corporate wealthy (Pretend you’re one of them),” Maher cleverly suggests that the mass amnesia plaguing our homes was, if not enthusiastically, then passively, embraced, making change all the more difficult.

This astounding document of the absence of peace in our time lists all open and declared armed hostile conflicts that have taken place between the year 1 and the year 2006. Printed in a tiny font and arrayed in two seemingly endless columns, these conflicts fill a mind-boggling twenty-two pages. The book is printed on accordion folded decorative paper, an uncomfortable reminder that the refinements of civilization are inseparably bound up with brutality.

This third edition comes in a plastic slipcase and includes a printed statement by the artist.

As the title suggests, this book compiles a list of the exact longitude and latitude of 1000 cities that have been sites of aggression between the years 1 and 2000 C.E. Culled from the artist’s local library resources and edited at her own discretion, the list disclaims comprehensiveness. Instead, as Maher explains in the introduction, this book attempts to collapse the temporal and geographic distance we maintain between historical violent events and our own lives, leading the reader into an “examination of our relationship to the profound and unremitting violence of history.” Included in the back is a list of activist, peace-seeking websites.

An illustrated narrative of an intimate relationship. “This novel poem, short story, essay, work of history, record of days in August 1994, was composed from splinters of travel and museum guides, postcards, passing remarks, journal entries, fantasies, reflection and analysis. A composite of tiny speech genres, illustrating a disruption of scientistic knowledge by the sensual and physical.”

Designed to look like official documents, the loose pages of this artist’s book are printed on what look like government bonds. Inside the frame of each rectangular page’s sober gray and blue scalop edge, texts describe five aspects of a phenomenon that pervades our culture: surveillance. In between the chapters entitled surveillance and knowledge, surveillance and purity, surveillance and reciprocity, surveillance and glamour, and surveillance and absurdity, the artist has inserted veils or masks. Photographs of faces with eyes closed have small holes cut into the eyelids so that the wearer can “turn the tables on those adversaries – whoever they may be – ” and practice his or her own version of surreptitious observation.

Incidences of violence–contemporary or historical–are identified only by their longitude and latitude. A short poem introduces the work, and an epilogue succinctly laments unrelenting violence in all its forms–war, murder, execution. A Hole is drilled through all the pages to reference the marking point on the earth.